A post circulating on Wednesday claims that Aerodrome liquidity farming accounted for roughly $109 billion of $121 billion in USDC transfers on Base in a single day, or about 90% of the total.
The underlying point is sound. The number is not verifiable, and the finding is not new.
Coin Metrics published the substantive version of it in February, with the methodology attached and considerably more modest figures.
What the Research Actually Found
In a note by senior research associate Tanay Ved, Coin Metrics examined USDC on Base and found that a single Aerodrome pool, the WETH and USDC pair, accounted for 32% of all adjusted USDC transfer value on the chain over the preceding year, some $6.4 trillion of $20 trillion.
Across January 2026, DeFi contracts as a whole made up roughly half of the $5.3 trillion in adjusted USDC transfer volume on Base. Large transfers above $100,000 had risen from fewer than 50,000 a day in mid-2025 to peaks above 450,000 in January.
The firm identified that activity by inspecting the contracts themselves, reading transaction event logs to separate liquidity position management from actual swaps, and detecting flash loans where a sum is borrowed and repaid within seconds. Its conclusion was plainly put. “A dollar cycling between LP tick ranges or flash loans is categorically different from a dollar settling a cross-border payment.”
The Numbers Do Not Agree
Coin Metrics put DeFi contracts collectively at around half of adjusted volume. Wednesday’s post puts Aerodrome farming alone at 90%.
Those cannot both describe the same thing. Either the composition shifted enormously between January and September, or the two are measuring different quantities, or one is wrong. The post links a Dune query without publishing its filters, which is the part that would settle it, and covers a single day rather than a period.
CNR is not in a position to adjudicate that, and neither is anyone else working from a screenshot. What can be said is that the lower, older, fully documented figure is the one that can be checked.
Why Any Stablecoin Volume Figure Needs Discounting
The clearest way to see the problem is not a percentage.
There is roughly $4.1 billion of USDC on Base. In January it produced $5.3 trillion of transfer volume. That is every dollar of supply moving about 1,290 times in a month, or something over forty times a day. No payment network behaves like that. What it describes is the same dollars cycling through pool contracts as liquidity positions are rebalanced.
This is well understood by the people who measure it properly. Visa’s onchain dashboard separates total stablecoin volume from an adjusted figure precisely to strip out bots and high-frequency activity, noting that public chains record activity from “both people and by software, including transactions that do not resemble conventional settlement.” Bernstein’s $17 trillion annualised stablecoin estimate from July is already an adjusted number.
Circle reported $14.8 trillion in USDC onchain volume for the second quarter, up 151% year on year. That figure includes trading and mechanical transfers alongside payments, and Circle says so. The headline number is not the payments number, and it never was.
